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Tableau Software: Dataviz with a Pixar touch

This article was taken from the September 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

Love infographics but lack the skills to create your own? Seattle-based Tableau Software can turn you into a graphics guru with a few click of your mouse. "We wanted to make it easy for anyone to ask questions of complex data," says Christian Chabot, CEO of the data-visualisation software startup. "So we built a database-visualisation language where someone with little spare time and no expertise can create real-time data graphics."

In 2005, Pat Hanrahan, a computer graphics professor who has won two Oscars for his graphic rendering work at Pixar, and Chris Stolte, a PhD student, invented the database query language VizQL in the same lab that hatched Yahoo! and Google. Using this language, they built Tableau Desktop, which unlocks data from specialist databases and puts it in the hands of novices. If you've got, say, access to a coffee-chain's sales database, you can sync it with Tableau's software. Drag-and-drop columns into a blank box and add variables such as dates, sale size or product name, and the software will reveal patterns in the data (see examples in the gallery). "We have 8,000 paying customers, from the US Army to Google, to schoolteachers and eighth graders," says Chabot. There's an infographic there...

This article was first published in the September 2012 issue of WIRED magazine